


Lion

by rabidsamfan



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-31 14:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1032872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidsamfan/pseuds/rabidsamfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the 18th of December, 1886, a memorial to the memory of the men of the 66th Berkshire Regiment was unveiled in Reading, but there is no record of Watson being there.  This is why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fabelschwester](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=fabelschwester).



**Disclaimer** : my thanks to Sir Arthur, for enticing me into a part of history that I might never have known otherwise. Also to thesmallhobbit, for the beta.

 

 

We were far too late.

By the time our train pulled into Reading station, the ceremonies were over. The speeches were done, the parade dispersed, the dignitaries departed, the audience scattered to whatever warm corners they might find against the first deep cold of December. Twilight was fading into true night, the stars brightening in a sky patterned with twists of smoke from every chimney in the town. The sensible thing would have been to cross the street to the Great Western Hotel, where I knew Watson had arranged a room for the night, and given the tugging ache of the stitches which were holding my right arm together, I had quite sufficient cause to be sensible.

I got Watson to his feet and put his walking stick in his hand. He nodded his thanks, being careful not to dislodge the scarf which hid most of the bandages on his head and neck. “It’s not far,” he reminded me for the seventh time, making it clear that he was still determined to complete the day’s journey which fate had interrupted. “A ten, fifteen minute walk from the station if the maps are right.”

The knowledge that he had to be in far more pain than I was more than enough cause to abandon good sense.

“More like twenty under the circumstances,” I countered, but I took his arm and steadied him onto the platform. “And the statue will still be there tomorrow.”

“I know,” he said, but his feet were already moving toward the barrier.

The waxing moon shone down from the zenith as we made our way down from the train. It lit our clouds of breath, and shone on the iceskins of hollow puddles between the cobblestones. I tried not to think about the pipe and tobacco pouch weighing down my pocket and concentrated instead on ensuring that Watson would not take yet another fall today. The other passengers were leaving us behind, wrapping themselves deeper into their woolen coats as they strode off to their homes and families and suppers.

“You don’t need to come.” Watson said, when I paused to wrap my own scarf more securely.

“You didn’t need to come to Dorset Street.” But he had, and my bruises certainly concurred with his snort of disagreement.

“I wasn’t about to run off while a friend might be bleeding to death in a ditch somewhere,” he said, and then added, so quietly that even I could scarce understand the words, “I’ve done enough of that for one lifetime.”

There was no answer for that. I could remind Watson that I wouldn’t have been bleeding in a ditch, but he would only point out that I most certainly would have been bleeding. My quarry of the morning -- a burly young navvy who called himself Jack Smith -- had come closer to ending my career than I cared to consider. Smith was a man evil beyond his years, and he had no less than three dead men on his account sheet. Twice he had walked free, the coroner’s courts choosing accident and self-defense in the face of a plethora of friendly witnesses. But I had been hired to prove beyond all doubt that Smith had both begun and ended the fight which had led to the third death, and it was no coincidence that from the moment my investigation began, Jack Smith had gone to ground in the malodorous warren of Whitechapel.

It was past ten in the evening when word came that, for this one night, Jack Smith could be found in one of the rookeries of Dorset Street Had it been any other day of the year, there would have been little question that Watson would accompany me, to witness the conclusion of a case in which he had taken a great deal of interest. But it was the evening of the seventeenth of December, 1886, and the telegram which reported Smith’s whereabouts had interrupted us in the middle of hunting for a stray button from Watson’s uniform. The letter inviting him to attend the unveiling of a memorial to the fallen from the Berkshire regiment on the eighteenth -- today -- lay open on his desk.

We turned left from the station onto the broad street and caught a glimpse of the bare fingers of trees reaching up in the middle distance, above the lines of houses and shops. “That must be the Forbury,” I said, unnecessarily, not liking the silence that had fallen on my companion, nor the way he was leaning all the harder on his stick. “Are you certain you want to walk?”

“I’ve walked farther,” he said, his voice gruff with weariness. “Go and find someplace warm to wait.”

“I’ve no intention of running off when I might be leaving a friend to freeze to death in a ditch somewhere,” I told him, rather testily. To my satisfaction, something like a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

“I shan’t freeze.” But he accepted the elbow I offered, transferring his walking stick to the other hand. His grip on my arm was familiar. That first winter in London, we’d walked this way any number of times, particularly when the pavements were icy. Sometimes I had taken his arm, and sometimes he, mine, but the end result had been the same. He would walk a trifle faster, and I, a trifle slower, until by spring our paces were so well-matched there was no need for touch.

On this occasion, however, Watson was unable to pick up his pace. He made a brief effort, but it was clear that he did not have the strength to move quickly and still keep his back parade ground straight and his chin high as we progressed. I began to wish that I had acquiesced to the hospital’s insistence that we both spend the night, or better yet, that I had delayed my work until Watson had been and gone to Reading.

In truth, I hadn’t even considered it. Indeed, it was not until I had sent word to Inspector Gregson that I had even thought to inquire whether Watson would prefer a few additional hours of sleep over attending a police raid.

“I wouldn’t sleep in any case,” he had said, emerging from his examination of the stacks of newspapers in the corner with a silver button displayed triumphantly on his palm. “Not if I were waiting to hear how things had gone. I might as well come along and get my news first hand. I should like to have something pleasant to contemplate whilst enduring all of the speeches tomorrow.”

“You’ll chance being late to ceremonies,” I had warned him. But Watson merely observed that if all went well he could attend the raid and still catch a morning train in plenty of time to attend the luncheon before the unveiling of the monument, and then settled down to restore the button to its proper place on his jacket.

So it had been that Watson -- his buttons bright and tight beneath his greatcoat and his boots gleaming below -- had caught his few hours of sleep amongst the constables which Gregson had assembled to wait for the warrant of authorization. I had preferred to pace the hours away, a fact I was regretting now, as my body ached for sleep.

If everything had gone to my plan, Watson would have stood well clear of the morning’s excitement, providing nothing more than some medical expertise afterwards and thereby preserving the gloss on his boots. Unfortunately, Jack Smith had enlisted his friends to make a trap out of the doss house, and his preparations were nearing completion when we began to break in the doors and windows shortly before dawn. The melee which followed, constables versus navvies and Gregson and I against the ringleaders, threw such a strain on the timbers of the house, already weakened by Jack Smith’s machinations, that the entire thing came down around us, and half the building landed in the cellar.

I had been lucky. Just before the collapse Smith had thrown a knife at me. I had still been under a table, frantically attempting to cope with the gash in my arm, when the ceiling came down, and I spent the hours awaiting rescue with room enough for a pretense at comfort. Watson, on the other hand, had been exchanging blows with Smith near the doorway, having thrown caution to the winds the moment I was injured. They’d both been pinned by debris.

“Why didn’t you just shoot him?” I asked.

“He was unarmed,” Watson said, accepting the leap of logic without demur. “And trying to make a run for it. I didn’t want to shoot him in the back.” His eyes drifted away from me again, and I knew by the tightening of his lips that he had been reminded once more of just why we had eschewed the comforts of Baker Street in favor of a cab ride to Paddington once our injuries had been tended.

We reached the end of the row of shops that were obscuring our view and turned right, into the Forbury grounds -- once the forecourt of Reading Abbey, and now a pleasure garden for the people of the town. Now we could catch glimpses of the object of our quest through a belt of bare-limbed trees -- a needed incentive as a lazy wind, unencumbered by any sheltering walls, swirled around us. We bent our heads into its icy current and trudged on.

As we cleared the trees Watson put up a hand to shield his eyes and stopped, staring at the dark figure of a pacing lion standing high upon an oblong pedestal near the center of the broad lawn. “My God,” he whispered. “It’s _huge_.”

“Indeed.” No Londoner is a stranger to massive statuary, but the recumbent lions of Trafalgar square would be considered tame compared to this erect, snarling beast. Part of that impression of size was due to the height of the pedestal, which was twice as high as even a tall man on its own. But the lion stood as tall, or taller, than that, the top of the mane soaring some twenty five feet above the ground. The whole of the monument dwarfed the gardens around it, and drew the eye so relentlessly that it wasn’t until we had approached within twenty yards of it that I realised there was an enclosure built to one side upon the grass where we could take shelter from the wind. It was but a temporary construction -- canvas and bunting stretched over a wooden frame -- still, it would do, if ever I could steer Watson towards it.

As we reached the edge of the round garden bed surrounding the monument we heard the nearby church’s bells announce the bottom of the hour.

Now we were close enough to see that the pedestal was covered with terra cotta, and between the flat decorative pilasters were inscriptions -- row upon row of names on the longer sides, and on the end nearest the lion’s head two long paragraphs dedicated to ensuring that the future denizens of Reading would know why their pleasant park was being guarded by so fierce a beast. I squinted in the moonlight and leaned over the flowerbed to read it aloud, translating the Roman numerals on the plaque into the vernacular.

_“This monument records the names and commemorates the valour and devotion of 11 officers and 318 non-commissioned officers and men of the (66th) Berkshire Regiment who gave their lives for their country at Girishk, Maiwand and Kandahar and during the Afghan Campaign (1879) - (1880)._

_"History does not afford any grander or finer instance of gallantry and devotion to Queen and country than that displayed by the 66th Regiment at the Battle of Maiwand on the (27th) July (1880)." -- Despatch of General Primrose._

Watson, who had let go of my arm in order to begin working his way through the names on the side of the pedestal, snorted. “Gallantry?” he repeated. “There’s nothing gallant about fighting for your life.”

I remembered Watson, blood on his forehead and collar, the uniform he’d so carefully restored to its former glory now ruined and rent from his efforts and filthy with plaster and brickdust, reaching in through the gap between beam and board to pass me a flask of tea and a sandwich to tide me over until the rest of the shattered house could be lifted away. “What about fighting for the lives of others?”

“That’s not hard either,” Watson said. “Not when you’ve come to know them like brothers.” He reached across to touch one of the names, and then another. “No. The hard part is...” He stopped, his fingertips lingering on one of the lines. “The hard part is knowing that you...that you _can’t_ fight for them.”

I looked over his shoulder at the name. “What did the T stand for?” I asked.

“Thomas,” Watson said. “Tommy. He was assigned to accompany me the first time I went out to the villages to offer the natives decent medical care. The children had terrible eye infections, and I needed to get some silver iodide into their eyes. I was terrible at it.” The memory brightened Watson’s expression for a moment. “But Tommy -- he was scarcely more than a child himself -- he talked to them and clowned about and let me put the medicine in his own eyes so that they and their mothers could see it would do no harm. They didn’t know a word of our language, and he didn’t know more than three in theirs, but somehow it worked. After that I asked for him to come whenever I went out.” Watson let his hand fall to his side. “He taught me how to eat a pomegranate. And...” Watson fell silent, and I could see his eyes glistening with unshed tears.

And I knew.

“And he was the one you left behind. The one who bled to death in a ditch,” I said, ever so softly, so that he could pretend not to have heard.

The tears spilled over, and Watson nodded.

“I ... My hands were full. We had so many wounded. And Tommy had been gut-shot. I couldn’t see how... even if there’d been a horse to spare.” Watson wiped his face, but more tears came to wet it again. “Later. Later I wondered if I should have ended his suffering myself. But at the time... no one wanted to spare a bullet. And I needed the morphine I had for the men who might survive. I only pray he died before the Afghans reached him.”

Watson bowed his head, and for a long time we stood there in silence. But the wind was bitter, and the night was growing darker. I took my friend’s arm and brought him to the enclosure, where I lit cigarettes for each of us once we were out of the wind.

When the tobacco had calmed him somewhat, Watson tugged his handkerchief free of his sleeve and restored his face to a sombre calm. “Thank you, Holmes,” he said. “I didn’t mean to burden you with that tale.”

“Burdens are meant to be shared,” I said. “What else are friends for?”

I waited until his cigarette was nearly gone before speaking again. “Perhaps you can find another way to commemorate him. Something besides a name on stone. Have you put him into your reminiscences?”

Watson looked at me, thoughtfully. “No,” he said. “But I should.” He leaned his head back, his eyes closed, and sighed, but I could see the tension easing from his shoulders, and the compulsion that had driven him to the shadow of the great bronze lion was fading at last.

I crushed my cigarette end against the rail to douse the embers. “Now come Watson, and let us go find some place warm. I want my supper, and so should you want yours.”

“Very well, Holmes,” Watson said, and took my arm again. “Perhaps I’ll use his name when I publish those accounts of your cases I’m always promising to publish. I have to change enough of the names in those for the sake of discretion.”

“That’s a thought,” I said, as we took the shortest path away from the lion to the shops and public houses in the shadow of the nearby church. “But who would you give his name? One of the Yarders? They’re clownish enough at times.”

Watson made a noise that could have been a chuckle. “But all too old,” he said. “No, No, I’ll give the name to one of the Irregulars. He’d like that better, I should think.”

“Right,” I said. “He can take charge of the lot of them and save me the trouble.”

Now Watson did laugh. “He’d definitely like that. A trail of boys following him like the Pied Piper? That’s Tommy to the life.”

He was moving more easily, and I do not think it was only that the wind was now at our backs. Perhaps he was right; perhaps what men call gallantry in those who have died still fighting back is something else. Desperation, or defiance, a simple denial of the doom that has fallen upon them. Even a scoundrel can fight to the last, as Jack Smith had done only this morning. But there is a gallantry in going on, despite horrors and wounds and losses that can never be made whole; a gallantry in acknowledging defeat, and yet not growing shy of battle. I would never find myself alone in peril if Watson had any say in the matter; and if I had all of the men whose names were carved into the terracotta plates on the monument behind us to thank for that, I knew that there was one name which would stand ahead of the others.

“Then let us go and raise a glass,” I said, aiming us for a door that intermittently opened to spill out light, and laughter, and tantalizing whiffs of beer and bread and stew. “To Tommy Wiggins! And to Life."

“Hear, hear!” said Watson, and let me lead the way.


End file.
